Visual saliency based redundancy allocation in HEVC compatible multiple description video coding

Abstract

Video delivery over error prone channels suffer from packet loss, which significantly deteriorates the reconstructed video quality. Multiple description coding (MDC) is an effective error resilient coding scheme for transmission of video over unreliable networks, where video is encoded into multiple descriptions having redundancy between them. The amount of redundancy between these descriptions has an important role in MDC, because it provides error resilience. In this paper, a new redundancy allocation scheme using visual saliency model is presented with an aim of achieving high decoding quality, when one or more than one descriptions are received at the decoder. The proposed MDC method splits the input video sequence into even and odd subsequences, which are independently encoded by using high efficiency video coding (HEVC) encoder. The missing frames in each description are predicted by using pixel interpolation and motion interpolation. The residual information is generated by using the interpolated frame and its adjacent frame from the other description, which represents the redundancy in each description. Residual information is encoded based on a visual saliency mask, which is generated using a global contrast based visual saliency model. In this work, two different modes are proposed for visual saliency based redundancy allocation to provide better perceptual quality, while decoding the descriptions. The proposed scheme is implemented on HEVC reference software HM 16.2 and compared with two state-of-the-art temporal subsampling based multiple description video coding methods. Experiments show that the proposed method performs better than the reference methods, both in lossless and packet erasure channel conditions.